Looking for an alternative to Adwords from Google? While Adwords remains the most popular Pay Per Click (PPC) based advertising, the high minimum bid price $1+ per click is making some of us look for a cheaper Adwords alternative to promote our products and services.
After all, we still need to advertise. We just need to do it at the right price.
Steuart Henderson Britt, author of Marketing Management and Administrative Action says,
“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
Adwords is Google’s billion dollar cashcow. An advertiser can sign up and place ads based on keywords they want to rank for alongside the search engine results and also within other websites across the web. Learn how you can earn back some of your advertising dollars here
The problems with Adwords is that it is becoming increasingly too difficult to rank for competitive keywords at a reasonable cost. For example, some keywords from the finance and legal industries can go for as much as $30 to $40 PER CLICK. Amazing… shocking!
Because of this, in order to run advertising at a reasonable cost, Adwords advertisers are opting for less popular keywords which has a negative effect on the amount of potential traffic they will receive overall, resulting in a poor click through rate for some keywords.
Adwords Alternative Networks
1. Bing Ads / Yahoo
Bing Ads is the largest Adwords alternative from Microsoft. Bing has partnered with Yahoo to bring PPC advertising to a larger audience.
Bing Ads is also complimentary to Adwords. Bing Ads claims to have 51 million people who do not search on Google, therefore you could reach a larger audience by using both Bing Ads and Adwords at the same time.
2. Facebook
Facebook offers advertisers a cheap way of targeting their ads to a specific audience for a low cost per click price.
The ads are placed on columns on an individual’s profile page and like Adwords, you have to bid to get your advertisement placed.
Because of the information shared by Facebook users, it is possible to target your advertisement according to gender, age, location, education, interests and relationship status.
However, Facebook Ads don’t have a high click through rate because users tend to be there for social reasons, as opposed to commercial reasons. This could be overcome with eye catching graphics and advertising your own Facebook page.
You could also chose to make your ad based on CPM (Cost Per Mile = 1000 ad impressions) where you pay a fee everytime the ad is viewed, not how many clicks it receives.
3. StumbleUpon Paid Discovery
StumbleUpon is a web based discovery engine which sources and recommends websites to users based upon their interests.
StumbleUpon Paid Discovery is where advertisers share their URL and select their targeted audience. The information is then used to recommend your website to users and you only pay when you get a unique visitor to you site via StumbleUpon.
Banner advertisements are not used on any websites and they guarantee targeted visitors straight to your URL without using any click throughs.
Pricing starts from $0.10 per stumble (when a user visits your website), but you often receive “free” stumbles along the way as well, which reduces the overall “per stumble” cost.
4. Outbrain
Outbrain offers another PPC form of advertising, but they publish website suggestions to viewers on well-known and respected websites such as CNN, GE and Time.
Outbrain Amplify is focused on small to medium sized web based businesses and makes reading suggestion based upon the types of articles the reader has been viewing.
However, Outbrain insists on advertising only engaging and quality content on your website, as that is how they choose whether or not to recommend your URL as a ‘related article’ that visitors see on the publisher’s website.
5. Clicksor
Clicksor is a contextual based advertising network making it a good Adwords alternative.
Clicksor chooses appropriate ads to be displayed based upon the website’s content.
The ads are placed on Clicksor’s affiliate websites where the position of the ad affects the bid price.
Clicksor offer four ways of paying for ads including the common CPC and CPM, as well as Cost Per Visit (CPV) and Cost Per Interstitial (CPI) advertisement. But Clicksor can also present advertisements in five different formats letting you choose the most appropriate one to meet your needs and budget.
6. BidVertiser
BidVertiser lets advertisers choose their own look and dimensions of ads so you can make yours stand out and maximize your conversion ratio.
BidVertiser allows advertisers to drive customers to their eBay listings, whereas some other networks don’t allow this. You can select your eBay item from within Bidvertiser and the ad is created automatically for you.
So whether you have a small or large budget, you will be able to find a suitable Adwords alternative that meets your advertisement needs.
It’s not tricky to find Adwords alternatives, but research carefully when choosing who to go with. Only give your money to respectable companies where it is obvious how they get visitors to your website.
Tags: adwordsadwords alternativebidvertiserbing adsclicksorfacebook adsgoogle adwordsoutbrainstumbleupon paid discovery
